It's the last day of January, and the little northern city by the sea is draped in crisp snow. But the days are longer now. I've heard chickadees singing their spring song. Hawks and owls are courting. Snowdrops are budding along warm foundations. Earth is imagining the future.

For me. it's been a nose-to-the-grindstone week: editing editing editing, planning planning planning, interspersed with appointments and arguments with the insurance company and other such aggravating chores. I've got three classes on the horizon: an all-day zoom session on Saturday--a reunion of participants in the 2023 Conference on Poetry and Teaching, which I'll be team-teaching with Teresa. And then on Tuesday, a full day as a visiting poet at Penquis High School, up north in Milo; and Wednesday, my usual Monson Arts cohort. None of these classes is anything at all like the others, so my thoughts have been flying from "generative writing fun for friendly adults" to "beginning activities for resistant general-level freshmen" to "all-day revision experiments with familiar eager young writers." I'm feeling a little dizzy.

Anyway, the planning is now mostly done, so today will reduce down to exercise session, followed by editing editing editing, followed by hair cut and grocery shopping and an early dinner, and then T and I will go out to the movies to watch an old Busby Berkeley musical at the local film archive.

It hasn't been a great week--weird family stuff, weird medical stuff--but my state of mind isn't terrible, so that's something. The beauty of the snow has been uplifting. The sweetness of my partner as well. I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm cooking, I'm walking. And the chickadees are singing their spring song.

Yesterday's snow was by far the prettiest of the season--the sort that clings to every branch and twig and sparkles like crystal in the watery sunlight. I wouldn't have chosen to shovel the driveway at 6:30 in the morning, but the fast-moving clouds, the daybreak glitter, were a delight, as was the drive across town to the hospital, threading my way under laden tree branches as elegant as lace.

It's a week filled with appointments. Yesterday I got appointment 1 is out of the way, and today's schedule features appointment 2: oil change for the car. Once again, I'll be hustling out of the house early: this time for an easy drive around the corner to the garage, and a trudge home through the frosty neighborhood. Then class planning and editing, then picking up the newly oiled car and turning my thoughts to dinner, whatever it may be. Last night I made Glamorgan sausages, which are not actually sausages but sautéed patties of leeks, cheddar, and breadcrumbs. Tonight maybe we'll have Bolognese sauce, if I get it started in time.

I've started rereading Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. I've been talking to my friend Betsy about an old essay I wrote, a piece about The Autobiography of Malcolm X--how dangerous it felt to address an icon's misogyny. I am tweaking revisions; also thinking about revision activities for my next Monson class; also plotting some writing prompts; also beginning to imagine a team-teaching day with my friend Gretchen--how will we combine poetry with dance and improvisational theater? . . . I am having some thoughts that seem to center around the notion of frame. My brain is both vague and bubbly, its usual state when I'm beginning to imagine new teaching situations.

Meanwhile, ice is falling from the trees, rattling against roof and windows, tapping and clattering, a thousand shards of glass.

Snow all night, and still snowing this morning. Maybe five inches, maybe four?--it's hard to tell through the window. What I know is that I have to dig out and drive in it this morning, all for the joy of a mammogram at the hospital across town. Blah.

Well, you've got expect such things from Mondays. They do like to cling to their spoiler role. And I had a restful Sunday, though every team I rooted for lost. I spent much of the day in the kitchen, making fish chowder, Yorkshire pudding, a baked Greek salad, raspberry sorbet. I read The Aunt's Story and worked on some poem drafts and went for a walk with Tom. So I guess I can cope with this stupid Monday.

This will be a busy week--appointments, editing, class prep--though at least I won't be on the road. I'll have to force myself out of dreaminess. I'll have to be useful.

But the snow is lovely--a fragile puff of cold, billowing like cream.

I think yesterday's class went well. It was a beginning essay-writing session--only three hours long and designed for people who are just starting to try out the genre or even writing altogether. For some, this was the first time they'd ever approached a piece via a focus on craft rather than subject, and it was sweet to see their wonder as they began to comprehend how.

The class took place at the University of Southern Maine library, maybe two miles from my house, so I was able to walk there and back, which was a pleasant addendum to the afternoon, given how housebound I've been this week. Efficiently backpacked, I trudged through the slushy Oakdale streets, up the hill into Deering Highlands, past the big Congregational church into my own Deering Center enclave. The air was gentle, scented with snow and soil and melt, and my body was glad to be moving through the world. 

Afterward, fresh-off-the-boat scallops for dinner, alongside buttered pappardelle and charred red cabbage; a fire in the wood stove; a long night's sleep in my own bed; a quiet Sunday morning to come.

Which is now.

Daylight unfolds over the little snowcrust gardens, over the paper-hat roofs, over a slow man and a slower bulldog, over a busybody cat trotting delicately around a sidewalk puddle.

I don't have pressing plans for the day, other than a trip to the grocery store to buy potatoes for fish chowder. I'll read my Patrick White novel; I'll take laundry off the basement lines; I'll walk up to the cemetery; I'll fidget with a poem draft; I might watch the Ravens game. Next week will be busy--an array of appointments and work obligations--but I am not going to think about any of that today.

What I am thinking is, How spacious the mind. I open a book and read a sentence from the novel by White: "Smells came in at the door, petrol and oil, fish, sea, and the white, negative smell of dust." The notion of smell as white . . . I am surprised, taken aback, abruptly convinced. I forget the plot, the character's reason for being in this place; I forget the place itself. My mind ticks over the oddness of white. Also, the author's name is White. I, too, am a writer entangled in my own common nouns. We are a strange group, all assigned the same table at a wedding, though we don't know what to say to each other. Robert Frost mutters to Ocean Vuong. I light a cigarette for Oscar Wilde.

How spacious the mind--its coiling inventions, its satisfying lies. Outside, the air is full of crows. Outside, snow spackles the grass, smoke curls up from the chimneys, the breeze is scented with trains.

If you read these words, picture your part.

Yesterday was an unexpected flurry of weather--snow, sleet, rain, slush; the streets and sidewalks a sudden slippery wretched mess.

Thus, I haven't taken a walk for two days, I missed my last couple of exercise sessions because of work schedule and a visitor, and I'm beginning to feel like a yam. Today I'll spend all afternoon in a chair, teaching a class; and though I'd hoped to walk to the university library where we'll be meeting, road conditions may be against me. Blah.

Ah, well. At least I can run up and down two flights of stairs and haul a vacuum cleaner around. Housework, the endurance sport.

Otherwise, what's new? Not much, I guess. Cackling over Trump's $83 million defamation verdict, drinking tea with an old friend, starting a new novel (Patrick White's The Aunt's Story), reading some Longfellow, copyediting a manuscript, fiddling around with a poem draft, braising teriyaki chicken, losing at cards . . .

And now the cat is curled up on his yellow chair, T is asleep upstairs. Outside, crows argue with jays; gulls argue with crows. Pale slush is spilt milk under this dim morning light.

I am trying to be a decent person. But who knows?

Friday, Friday. It's been a long work week, and it isn't over yet as I'll be teaching on two Saturdays in a row. Tomorrow I'm leading an in-person afternoon intro essay-writing class for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Next week will be an all-day zoom generative-writing extravaganza with last year's teaching conference participants. Then I've got a two-day stint up north : an in-school, four-classes-of-freshmen teaching-artist day plus my usual Monson Arts session. I'm prepared to be exhausted.

So I'm going to try to keep today low-key: a morning walk with a friend, some housework, some class prep, some editing. But I hope none of this will rule the hours, that maybe I'll get a chance to write and read and idle.

I'm feeling slightly blue this morning: a little anxious about family matters, about poems, about employment. I assume the haze will wear off and I'll trudge forward into the day, without clarity but at least with my usual donkey trot. I'm grateful for the man upstairs, just waking up for work; for our young people, far away in their lives but always extending their hands. I'm grateful for books and long walks, for you, for my poet friends and my nothing-to-do-with-poetry friends, for my idiot cat, my kitchen, my garden. A cocoon in a harsh world.

It snowed all day yesterday, then last night apparently rained on top of that, so this morning everything is slick and nasty and dangerous-looking.

The cat is disgusted with winter. He barely sets a paw outside, just glowers and stomps and picks at the furniture, with the clear goal of trying to drive me crazy.

Despite the foul weather, life is sinking back into its usual pattern. After driving P to the bus station, I spent the day washing sheets, changing the guest room back into my study, editing, dealing with emails, and so on and so forth. Today, more editing, and then a midmorning phone call with the curator at the Maine Women Writers Collection about restarting the process of moving my papers into their archive. Before the pandemic I'd had some early conversations with the then-curator about making that move. But then everyone got distracted, the curator changed jobs, I forgot to think about the issue, and thus here we are, starting from the beginning. But I'm glad to be thinking about it again. Women writers in Maine are so fortunate to have an archive that wants to house their work, and I'm pleased to have the chance to make my sons' lives easier, to leave them with less to deal with when the time comes while still making sure they have decision-making power if they want it.

So that conversation is on today's docket, and then grocery shopping and probably some housework, and then making something or other for dinner with the poets tonight.

I'm almost finished with Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. It's a brilliant and sorrowful book, one that I can only read in small bursts. She is almost too intelligent for me; it takes me a while to grasp what she is saying about these books I know so well. I am such a non-intellectual reader. I read and reread and reread; I slip into these books like I slip into my shoes, but I am rarely smart about them. Hardwick, though: she is thoroughly smart, but also, often, filled with pity, admiration, frustration for both authors and characters . . . and those are emotions I can share with her. Here's what she has to say about Jane Carlyle, wife of the Victorian biographer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle:

It is sad to think of Jane Carlyle's last years. Neurasthenia accounted for a lot of her torments in the middle of the night. But she has such gaiety and reasonableness that we are scarcely prepared for the devastation that swept over her as a result of feeling undervalued, put-upon, refused the consolations of a grateful husband. Once when she told Carlyle that she had, at a certain moment, thought of leaving him, he replied, "I don't know that I would have missed you. I was very busy just then with Cromwell." The raging productivity of the Victorians shattered nerves and punctured stomachs, but it was a thing noble, glorious, awesome in itself.

Jane Carlyle's subversive irony and her ambivalence make her the most interesting of the wives we know about in this period. It is very risky to think of her as a failed novelist or as a "sacrificed" writer in some other form. All we can look for are the openings she--and Dorothy Wordsworth, also--came upon, the little alleys for self-display, the routes found that are really a way of dominating the emotional material of daily life. [Hardwick was reading a collection of her letters.] The chanciness of it all, the modesty, the intermittent aspect of the production--there is pathos in that. In the end what strikes one as the greatest personal loss of these private writing careers is that the work could not truly build for the women a bulwark against the sufferings of neglect and the humiliations of lovelessness. The Victorian men, perverse as many of them are, were spared these pinches of inadequacy, faltering confidence, and fears of uselessness.